Elon Musk offers to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share.

Another big big if true and also plausible:

https://twitter.com/rainofterra/status/1588601987561836544?s=46&t=wkMFtVjJkbLn7azUTnJ-WQ

I don't remember if it was on the Opening Arguments podcast I linked to above, or another podcast that I listened to but there's a small loophole Musk can use to justify it. Basically, there's nothing the shareholders of Tesla can do if he says that he was using the engineers to see if there's an advantage to sharing some of the code between the companies.

Having worked in the related industries for most of his companies, I can say that there are real, potential, benefits to code sharing between the companies. All of them are tightly connected to communication networks and have to worry about things like data compression, packet loss, encryption, and signal strength. Each company has probably come up with its own unique solution to those problems.

Now, let's be honest, Musk isn't having them do that. He's probably wanting them to look over the code because he trusts his engineers more than he does the ones at Twitter, so you'll have guys who were working on battery management software staring at code dealing with embedding images. Things will be even more fun if none of Twitter's software is written in a computer language used by the other companies. At best, the product of this will be that Teslas are better able to Tweet than other cars, in all likelihood. Which should piss @steve2^4 off to no end.

A real interesting question is what happens if Musk manages to tank not only Twitter but his other companies as well. SpaceX is a no-brainer, thanks to all their government contracts. You'll get a handful of rich guys, who'll go before the bankruptcy judge and say, "We've got the government to agree to give us a contract worth $X if you'll let us buy the company." The judge will let them buy the company for some portion of X, and the guys will immediately get a bunch of other contracts from the government and other companies, so they'll effectively get the company for free (and its debts will all have been erased as part of the bankruptcy). Same thing with Starlink. The Boring Company, OpenAI, and Neurolink are probably dead, with few people even interested in any of their IP.

Tesla? Well, that's another story. Every US automaker out there already has their own electric vehicle program going, and are probably going to be reluctant to adopt Musk's, as even if they get the company for cheap, switching over either Tesla or their lines to Tesla's gear is going to be very expensive. It's not like when Chrysler bought AMC back in the 80s. AMC was already using a lot of Chrysler parts in their vehicles, the Jeep brand was profitable and unique, and nobody really cared when Chrysler killed off the AMC line.

Anybody who picks up Tesla, even if they only intend to build Musk-era vehicles for another year until they can rebadge their cars as Teslas will have to keep an inventory of Musk-era Tesla parts on-hand for the next seven years. They'll also have to figure out how to dispose of the parts for older Teslas that they don't have to support. Then there's the issue of dealer networks. Unlike every other car company in the US, Tesla owns all their dealerships (which is why you can't buy a Tesla from a dealer in Texas). The automakers and dealers already have a pretty sour relationship with one another, going back decades (made even worse by the economy imploding in '08). A car company tries to buy Tesla, and they're going to catch a lot of shit from dealers. A lot of shit. If the first words out of a CEOs mouth after he (or she) announces that they're buying Tesla isn't, "We'll be offering the current Tesla dealerships to our existing dealers for free," there's going to be a legal battle like you've never seen.

Which means that you could basically see Tesla winding up like DeLorean, where the company was dissolved, the inventory of completed cars was sold off to one company, the parts were sold to another, the IP to a third, and the rights to the name to a fourth. Sorta sucks if you were a DeLorean owner, especially since the cars were crap. With Tesla, however, you're dealing with a completely different animal. The cars are tightly controlled by closed-source software and a lot of proprietary hardware. We also know that Tesla can remotely brick your car if they don't like a repair you've made to it. What happens if Musk threatens to do the same to all 3 million Teslas on the road if he's not given a bailout? Or what happens if the cars just start bricking themselves after the company goes under and they can't contact the mothership? Or, if the only folks wanting to buy the company are connected to the Chinese government?

Oh, gawd, the responses are some of the funniest things I've read.

https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1589097173136060417?s=20&t=siX2HWujD5fy5XMl6BX20Q

Also, I'm trying to goad Bezos into saying, "Elon, I'm laughing at the superior intellect" on Twitter. It'll probably get me banned from Twitter, but it'll be oh, so, worth it.

You literally can't parody them when they were their fascism right on their sleeve

It's hard to know what's actually going on from the context there. Protected accounts can't be retweeted as a standard thing, and without being able to see his recent Tweets there's no way to know if there was something else recently posted that prompted the warning on his profile.

Not that I think it's implausible that Musk is thin skinned and just hit the button, but the evidence ain't there for this one.

Always all the SpaceX/Tesla engineers chat is very speculative and I think making some big assumptions. It would be trivial for those engineers to be on leave from their other positions while taking a short term contract role with Twitter. That doesn't mean that Elon didn't just bring them across without any legal consult, but honestly it's probably all done legally.

Not speculative, they are there.

So basically elon has bought a platform running on modded old tech and then fired all the people who know what mods were done. He is basically just a script kiddie who does not knoiw actual genius programming and when things start to tear apart the system he is not going to know how to fix it because he isn't really the tech genius everyone thinks he is because he only bought other people's ideas? and all of this is going to hit the world's biggest dumpster fire platform that was overwhelmingly bringing troll shitstorms to the world anyway, and given better technology and moderation we would all be better if internet society was forcefully disinfected of the platform's presence? The only people who are really going to be hurt are tech bro investors, elon musk, and twitter addicts in this controlled purge/destruction?

This is hilarious.


Multiple sources and Twitter Blind chats now saying that the company has begun to reach out to some people it laid off yesterday asking them to come back. Whoops!

https://twitter.com/caseynewton/status/1589075543420325888?s=46&t=ueWlrgiFrbsymPrSFmBvwQ

Musk doesn't like being laughed at. He's really not going to like when at least some of the peons he's asking to come back tell him to piss up a rope.

He's got quite a bit of Tesla stock up as collateral for his Twitter acquisition.

However, because Twitter isn't doing well it could actually devalue the Tesla stock as well - and the banks could require more as collateral to maintain the loan.

It's quite possible Tesla competitors like GM and Volkswagon are fleeing the platform in hope that it will hurt Tesla's valuation and damage a competitor.

There's also reports that the sole criteria Musk used to determine who was getting laid off was the lines of code they wrote in the last year.

Which is astonishing if true, because that's the antithesis of how you evaluate programmers. The more elegant and sparse the code to equal the same effect the better.

And he wiped out entire teams including project launch teams for new features. This is no doubt why they are scrambling to hire people back.

But then he had already decided on firing everyone in top management who would know what was valuable and what wasn't.

This is just absolutely brutal, and a clear example as I've ever seen of how not to run a business.

It is interesting how elon will pribably burn twitter to the ground but he will still end up being able to do things and live an extravagant life. It is almost like he is burning money doing us a service showing how free speech is important and we should refine it through good moderation rather than piss it away on rich corporate lies.

as a master troll I see a version where elon is fucking with the world like the world's biggest manipulator. It all looks the same from this angle so I don't know if any of that bullshit is true.

Going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying “parody” will be permanently suspended

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589390597798125568?s=46&t=VFYiHua1G9tBAANoGr040A

Like I always say with content moderation, every social media site owner who is “pro free speech” meets their line eventually.

For 4chan, it was anime child porn. For Facebook and YouTube, it was white nationalist terror. For Elon, it was people making fun of him.

https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/1589396844131782656?s=46&t=VFYiHua1G9tBAANoGr040A

For you, it was Gturner speaking ill of Hillary Clinton.

for wordforge it was banning dayton kitchens.

And, in case you’re wondering, he’s been banned.

Good to se the butthurt from the left because their playground is being torn down. Love it.

Ah, this must be a definition of “butthurt” I’m unfamiliar with. Everybody I know is laughing at “the superior intellect” who has managed to piss away at least $44 billion.

What’s really sad here is that you need to believe that

Back in reality it looks like most people are having a laugh at him and taking the piss

What is Mastodon, and why is it surging amid all the chaos at Twitter?

In a nutshell, Mastodon offers better privacy protections and is more decentralized than Twitter (which is both a pro and a con).

Also, Twitter is now owned by a nutjob.